Quote:
Originally Posted by Growler
I'd be willing to wager there's more than one Army or Marine Corps veteran who would disagree with your take on the IJA. Guys who fought on Guadalcanal, Iwo, Okinawa, Peleliu, or who flew with the AVG. An enemy that won't give in, even when you're using flamethrowers on them, doesn't sound like a terrorized army to me. As to artillery, do you know of many World War Two artillery pieces that can out-punch the main guns of battleships and heavy cruisers - who, in reported cases, were using their main armament in direct fire?
The Japanese infantry were perpetually undersupplied by USN interdiction during the last half of the war, yet still they fought; still they exacted casualties in return.
And as a result of those tenacious defenses, the predicted casualties of Operations Coronet and Downfall topped, by some estimates, one million American dead and wounded. One million. Sure, Japan would have lost the war, maybe even reduced to near-extinction levels (as some in Japanese High Command promised would be the case). One million invader casualties would have been pretty hard to swallow back home.
They may not have won the war, but it was not through any lack of tenacity.
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Yes, but tenacity in defense is not the measure of quality (when they are literally stranded and will be executed if they abandon their posts). In addition, IJA equipment was terrible. Terrible. They had no arty worth mentioning. They had crappy rifles (and worse pistols not that that matters). They had crappy MGs. Like all the axis forces, they had abysmal intelligence. Their attack doctrine seemed to be "Charge!" (aka, "Banzaiiiiii!").
Guadalcanal, in fact—a point at the very apex of Japanese success, this was the IJA at its very best—showed how entirely useless they were against quality troops that were well led. What did they do? They walked into artillery and MGs and literally died to the last man for zero gain. Zero. As raptor said above, in a real battle vs a modern army, they always lost, badly. Always. Malaya was a perfect storm for them. Had the UK forces been even competently led (instead of
terribly led) they'd have lost, or at least been slowed for months—and that is with utter air superiority assumed for their side.
IJA troops are near the bottom of my list, frankly.
That doesn't disparage the Marine and Army units that fought them. Their suicidal nature on
defense made them fight when any rational force would have surrendered. But the IJA never even managed a pyrrhic victory with their tenacity, merely defeat. Sure, they killed a lot of troops for nothing.
So you'd have line infantry that would all die, killing many of the enemy if it was defense (and almost none on attack)—but they'd almost always lose the battle. Hope you have massive reserves as every unit put onto the line entirely dies.